Support Your Local Monster Hunter

by Dennis Liggio

  And you can also see when bad things are about to happen to someone else. I watched two people, at first just looking at them like everyone else. However, after a moment's examination I tensed up as I recognized what was going on from the body language of each.

  First a woman walked out of the crowd. Loose, uncaring, possibly a little drunk. Not tense in any way that mattered, her movements languid, uncaring, almost theatrical. Then a few seconds later a man walked after her. Tense, eyes fixed upon her, hands in his pockets. Walking not too fast, as he was holding himself back, keeping his movements purposeful but not overt or conspicuous. Head and neck pulled a bit forward in anticipation, almost bowed under his hooded jacket. Watching out of his peripherals for anyone paying attention, but keeping pace behind her. I had seen it before. Predator and prey. Something was about to go down.

  I really had no idea where she was going. She was walking out the north end of the Night Market. It was the south end that gently died and lead toward the more inhabited areas of the Husks, the bus stop, the highway, and the train station. Why this side? There was nothing here but desolation and abandoned buildings. It was dangerous this way. Had she parked her car this way in poor judgment?

  I was further confused when she turned away from the wide, but disused street, and walked into a dark side alley. This was not just odd, it was bizarre. Why give up the roomy, moderately lit street for a cramped alley where no one could see? Did she know she was followed? In the predator world, she pretty much just presented her belly to have it clawed out. Of course the man who was stalking her followed down the alley. I was surprised to not see him jump into the air and kick his heels together in glee after seeing her go into the dark and cramped alley. Like a kid in a candy shop, he went down the alley, picking up speed.

  And I followed.

  Why I also went into that alley wasn't really something I thought about. On the face of it, I hunt monsters, not thwart criminals. I'm not a superhero and the ethics I try to live under are that I kill only monsters, not people. I'm pretty sure I have indirectly caused the death of other people in places like the Clark Building, and part of me hopes I indirectly caused the death of Ezra Ross, but overall I don't want people to die. I don't want to be holding the weapon that kills someone. So I try not to get in fights with other people, since I can't cut loose, I can't fight them like monsters. Fighting crime is someone else's problem. But I was acting more on instinct than anything else as I followed the predator into the alley. Violence was on his mind, and maybe I could scare him away or stop him. Once I had seen the situation, I couldn't walk away.

  As I entered the alley and my eyes adjusted, I heard the sounds of struggle already in progress. There was the squeak and scrape of shoes on the ground as I saw the two dark figures come together. I ran forward, pulling out my flashlight, relying on it as both a makeshift weapon and light. I shined it on them as I shouted, "Get away from her!"

  I came to a quick stop as the flashlight told me I had misread the situation. I had expected to see the woman frail in the man's arms, held tight or bleeding, the man almost demonically holding her, his lust for blood and violence in the middle of being sated. The truth was far different. What I saw was the woman standing straight and the man held by her. At first I thought I was wrong about the entire predator/prey angle and that there was no violence here. As I looked, I wonder if I had foolishly interrupted a couple's kinky roleplay, as I noticed her face buried in his neck. But his body was tense, his arm shaking. Then I saw a knife in his hand, which now dropped to the ground with an audible clatter.

  Hearing my shout and seeing the light, the woman lifted her head from the man. Blood surrounded her mouth. I had been wrong. She wasn't prey, she was just a predator of predators. Fuck, I thought, I just wandered into a revenant feeding.

  I had fought monsters in New Avalon for a few years, and during that time, I had never encountered what Hollywood would call a Vampire. The twin fanged, sometimes sparkling, sometimes charming, sometimes brutal, immortal undead fiend just never appeared. According to "Traditional Hunters" who killed monsters outside the New Avalon area, there were indeed vampires elsewhere in the world. But they also claimed a variety of creatures never seen in New Avalon, such as werewolves, so I found it hard to take them seriously on the claim. Especially when these same hunters were unfamiliar with revenants, which I knew existed.

  I had always thought that revenants were what people encountered when they claimed vampires. Both were alpha predators. Both stalked their victims one on one to feed off their blood. I had no idea if revenants were immortal like vampires, but they didn't seem undead either, not that I investigated that fact much. Okay, so I'm maybe not giving you a compelling list of differences. The obvious difference was their jaw and how the fed. Vampires had the famous fangs - two teeth to pierce the skin and vein/artery, then the very human mouth just drank the blood. Revenants have a completely different jaw structure. Oh, they look human, but once they feed, their mouth widens up to have a circular opening filled with rows of teeth. Once I saw scientific photos of leeches and lampreys on the internet, I knew exactly what revenants looked like. You can recognize their bites too, as the skin is ripped up in that pattern.

  Revenants are strong, and quick. For all our bluster, Mikkel and I had only had three experiences with revenants. First was the one who killed our mom. That one had given Mikkel his scar, and it took years before we hunted him down and disposed of him. Second was a strange attack. It was in our second year of hunting. A client wanted to meet us and set the location. We showed up and were ambushed by a revenant. We barely escaped, and I have no idea how we did. I was in bed for two days with an injury. But during our escape the revenant did not follow us outside the building and never called or contacted us again. Was that to send us a message to stay away from them?

  The third time was last year. Minerva Technics had captured a revenant, which had escaped when the biomed center's lockdown protocols went all weird due to our ill-fated rescue mission. He had let us live, but had wanted info on Ezra Ross, the scientist he blamed for his torture. Ross had escaped to Japan and... well, that revenant now knew that too.

  If I had just interrupted a revenant feeding, she was going to be pissed. And I was barely armed and unprepared. In a fair fight, I was dead. Unarmed, I was dead. If I panicked, I was dead. And I was very damn well panicking at that moment. I froze. I could do nothing else but keep the flashlight on the woman's face as her eyes flared with a rage greater than any human being could muster. Her mouth opened to hiss at me.

  Wait a minute... I kept the light shined on her as my eyes narrowed in confusion, that bewilderment overtaking my panic. She opened her mouth, but something was very wrong. I didn't see the circular rows of teeth, nor her face seeming to expand to allow those teeth to get at their victim. Her mouth did seem to open a little larger than a normal human being, but the rows of teeth were missing. Instead she had two long, sharp, and bloody fangs.

  What was going on? In my confusion I began to wonder if she wasn't a monster. A vampire-fan gone too far? But how did she have the fangs that actually cut someone? Okay, maybe surgically altered. But then how did she overcome her assailant? Perhaps some training? But the enraged eyes, the large mouth opening?

  All doubt of her status as a monster disappeared as she let go of the man and leapt toward me, clearing the distance of twenty feet before the man's limp body hit the ground. Her hands grabbed at my arms, her dual fanged mouth hissed in my face. Something in me laughed at the ludicrousness of the situation. I was going to die not in great fear, but in bewilderment that maybe vampires actually existed.

  Her face was close when I heard something hit the ground just behind me. There was a sound something like a simultaneous poof and crack, and everything got really bright. I had heard of flash bang grenades, but this seemed like just the flash and no bang. It had gone off behind me, but my vision was still disrupted by the sudden bright light. But I could see that the woman, who had b
een facing the flash, was even more disoriented. She stepped back from me, her hand letting go of me as she grabbed at her eyes.

  I was conscious of the beat of feet on the ground as someone ran down the alley. I wondered if it was the man who had tried to attack her. Before I could make much sense of anything, I heard the thunk of a weapon hitting flesh. I looked at the woman to see something sharp pierce her chest, as it was thrust from the other side and its tip had just completed the journey through her. I blinked hard, trying to get my eyes to adjust. Was that a sharpened wooden stake sticking out of her? Had the world just gone crazy? Was I on some fashionably hip paranormal television show?

  The woman's body fell to the floor with a slump. It did not decay into dust immediately, it did not explode, nor anything else. Television and TV had lied to me. Vampires just left ugly corpses.

  I turned to the man who stood behind the corpse. He was about my height, in his fifties, brown hair washed with gray, a mustache, and a 5 o'clock shadow. He had some weight on him from the years, but when I saw him move, he had the coiled smoothness I recognized in other hunters. He wore a leather jacket and otherwise unassuming clothes, but I think I saw the bulge of a weapon on him. He was staring at me oddly, maybe waiting to see how I was going to react.

  "Uh, thanks," I said as my vision stabilized and I could stop blinking every other second.

  "You messed up my stakeout," he said. He had a very strong New Avalon accent, but I'd notice the longer he talked that every so often he pronounced a word odd, that made me think that while he had adapted very well, English was not his first language.

  "Stakeout? This?"

  "I had been tracing her for a week. Tonight I was following her back to her comrades. Now I don't have that option."

  "Well... sorry? I guess. Hey, wait a minute, you weren't going to engage? What about this guy?" I pointed to the man on the ground next to his knife. There was still blood on his neck.

  The hunter looked at me incredulously. "He's a killer. The world grows a shade better without him in it. He is as bad as she is, he just lacked her reason for doing it."

  "But he was.. is?... human," I said. "It's not for us to judge."

  "I already did judge, and this human filth deserves to die," said the hunter. "If it makes you feel better, dial 911. But out here, they won't get here before he bleeds out. If he hasn't already."

  "Dude, you're harsh."

  He shrugged. "I'm not sure I could have saved him if I wanted to. With these creatures, even a split second choice could mean death. And I am after bigger game than her. She could have led me to more important targets, and I could have shifted the balance of power in Avalon."

  "Huh? Balance of power?"

  "Don't worry about it," he said, waving his hand dismissively. He crouched by the woman's corpse, which I noticed seemed to have aged rapidly. The hunter went through her pockets, then grabbed her purse.

  "Are you robbing her?"

  "I need new leads," he said. "This is likely where they would be."

  I looked down at the body. Was that even the same body? The woman looked desiccated now, as if the fluids had all drained out of her. "So that's what they do? Vampires just age rapidly until they turn to dust?"

  He shook his head. "They age into an old corpse."

  "Really? They don't just vanish into nothing like on TV? I always thought that would be great. Nothing to clean up. A dead body is just a pain."

  "It's really not a pain," said the hunter. He pulled a matchbox from his pocket and lit a match. Then he flicked the match onto the woman's corpse. It barely struck and the entire body went up in flames with a whoompf! It was as if she had been covered in gasoline. I watched as the fire quickly burned her down. "That's just as good as dust," responded the hunter. He turned to leave.

  "Wait! Uh... I'm a hunter too," I said.

  He did not pause in his walk. "I know."

  I ran to catch up with him. "Hey, maybe I could help you with stuff. Y'know, in return for messing up your stakeout." I paused. "Oh, I just got that! Stake-out! Funny!"

  He must not have intended that to be funny, because he didn't laugh or even smile. "You hunt. Would you take someone very inexperienced along with you on dangerous jobs?"

  "Well, no, but I'm not that inexperienced! I hunt all the time!" Except recently, where I needed a goddamn permission slip to hunt. "So I'm not really that green."

  "You hunt simple things," he said dismissively.

  "Well, how the hell do you know?" I said.

  He paused in his walk. "Do you hunt what you call vampires? Do you hunt the leeches with the circular jaws?"

  Definitely no on the first, but we technically hunted one of the others. But I had already been knocked down a few pegs that night, so I didn't pretend to be too much more than I was. "Well, no, not really..."

  "Then you are not useful to me," he said, started to walk away again. We had walked to one of the actual used streets in the Husks. This was where many parked their cars for the Night Market.

  "Oh c'mon," I said. "From what you just said, you're not even going off to fight. You gotta get leads and stuff. And stakeouts. I could ride along. Get to know the tricks, soak up on your technique."

  He stopped and whirled around, causing me to nearly blunder into his face. I noticed he had a real intense look when he wanted to. What was it with old hunters? Jericho was like this too. Very intense. Then again, if you live that long, you gotta be. He said nothing, but his look was challenging.

  "I... I want to learn," I said under the pressure of that withering gaze. "I've never encountered a vampire before. And... well, I have nothing to do. Things in my life have gone really, really poorly in the past forty-eight hours. I just feel like I could benefit with riding along with you."

  He eyed me, as if checking the truth of my words by the minute changes in my face. I have to admit I was being honest. After that farce of an intervention I was hurting and lonely. And if vampires did exist, I needed to know about them. I might encounter them again and I needed to be prepared. Other than that? I admit I just had a feeling about this guy. I don't know how to describe it. I felt like I could trust him.

  He finally must have gotten what he needed. He turned away and walked over to a car, pulling keys out of his pocket. The car was a brown Crown Victoria, many years old, scratched but solid.

  "You can come, but there's one condition," he said, opening the driver's side door and sliding in. The passenger side door unlocked.

  I opened the door and slid into the car, becoming very conscious of us not being alone. In the backseat there sat a large dark figure. As my eyes adjusted and his head moved, I realize the backseat held a large black Great Dane. It leaned its head forward to sniff at me cautiously.

  "He has to like you," said the man.

  Night Drive

  Luckily, dogs love me. It's just one of those things. Many humans seem to hate my guts, but dogs have always enthusiastically wanted to be my friend. Sometimes extremely enthusiastically, like Tor's dogs, who would cover me in slobber every time I saw them, sometimes multiple times a day.

  This dog, Ace, was no different. Initially cautious, because I was a new person and he was some sort of trained attack dog, he took a moment to check me out. But as soon as he got a few good sniffs and let me scratch his head, he was sure I was one of the good people. His body language softened and his tail started wagging rapidly.

  Having befriended the beast, I introduced myself, and the hunter nodded. When I asked after his name, he took a long pause, then said, "Kolchak."

  "Is that your real name?" I asked. That pause had told me no.

  He shrugged as he held the wheel. "We all have our secrets." And that's all I ever got from him on the name. If I was savvy like Mikkel, I would have caught the reference in the name and could have at least been amused.

  We drove into Midtown. Without a direct target to shadow, Kolchak needed to pick up someone else and see what they had. It didn't sound much like the mon
ster hunting I knew, it sounded more like police work.

  "Are you a cop?" I asked.

  "Eh?" he said with confusion.

  "The old Crown Vic, a stakeout, trailing people," I said. "You're more like a cop than any hunter I know."

  "Perhaps they're not very good hunters," he said.

  I rolled my eyes. "I feel like that's a poor excuse."

  He gave a quick laugh. "We probably hunt different things. When you hunt a foe that can look like a person, is as smart as a person, is stronger and faster than a person, the search is going to be much more like the police, who essentially hunt people. And since our foes are better than us, we need every advantage we can get, and the biggest one is surprise. So we search. And I don't want to hear any lip about my car."

  "But it's like an old cop car," I said. "Look at this upholstery! Look at that dash! You have a tape deck! What year is this thing? It's probably older than I am!"

  "It's a 1988 Ford Crown Victoria," he said. "And before you go telling me bad things about it, I challenge you to find a better car for what we do. This one is solid. You know exactly where you stand with it."

  "But what about trucks? A jeep? A van? Something that better holds your gear?" Mikkel had a van, Paulie had a truck, Meat had an SUV. That seemed to work for all of them.

  "Yeah, and then you stand out," said Kolchak. "You can't tail someone in a van or a jeep. They look behind them and see the obvious van following them. And a truck shows off your gear to everyone. No, you go for a sedan. Nondescript, doesn't stick out. Crown Vic or old caddy, since you want something sturdy. Older is better - you can keep an old car running a lot of years without knowing all the electronics and computer stuff in the new cars. They're not made of plastic and crumple zones, so they can take a hit or dish it out if you need to. You can get old junkers and restore them if you need to. And if you're going to the east side of the Husks, you should take a beaten up car if you don't want to get stolen."